Photograph

It is kind of crazy these days with digital cameras and the ability to save so many pictures on memory cards and computer files.  I know in our house we don't print that many pictures as we did many years ago, I have a zillion pictures but they are all on the computer. It makes me wonder if the girls will one day enjoy scrolling through the many computer folders as I did looking through old photo albums.  I guess it is kind of the same but it kind of isn't...but is that just in my head?  Since the girls will grow up using this technology maybe they would not know the difference.  But you know what? They do know the difference.

Last week while I was rotating the girls' toys packing up boring ones and reintroducing ones they forgot about I pulled out Maise’s old squish photo book.  It holds 4 photos and protects them so little ones can chew and tear at it.  Since we had not used it since Maise was tiny I had to update some of the pictures in it to add a little Nessa to the mix.  There was an old photo album my mom recently found and brought over to me and as I looked to find pictures Maise noticed the album and began looking at it very carefully and asking questions about the pictures and pointing out faces she knew.

The thing that blew me away was for one, she was taking possession of objects in the photos that she had never seen.  There was a photo of an old plush horse I had as a child and a photo of some fireworks from a family reunion many moons ago.  Maise declared and showed off in the photos, "My Horse" and "My fireworks".  It was wild to see this false memory, if you will develop in my Maise.  Second, was that she just loved that she was holding the photograph, she knew it was different than a normal piece of paper, she knew it was special, she knew it was different and she actually called it a photograph.  It is the simple things in life sometimes that people take for granted.  How amazing is it to have these little ones to show us how amazing things a minor as a photograph can be so unbelievable.